Username: Guest
Admin: no
Printable Version
Up until 1662, copyright protection was not thought of, or deemed necessary. Without printing presses available, it was unusual that a copyist could produce more than one copy of a text in an entire year. With this slow rate of copying, asserting the right of ownership over a work was unnecessary, and in the few cases that occurred, the common law was sufficient.
With the introduction of the printing press to Europe in 1450's by Gutenberg, copyright slowly began to become a more pressing issue. By 1483, the Ripola Press in Florence would charge three florins sheet for setting up a sheet and printing a run of Plato's Dialogues. By comparison, a scribe would charge one florin for a single copy. By comparison, a three florin print run was 1,025 copies1.
In 1662, the King passed a law requiring all books to be registered, and copies deposited with Stationer's Company, which was also given the power to seize books that were either heretical, or treasonous. Only the printing house which first created the book could print it.2
The Statute of Anne was passed on the 10th April, 1710. It was the first law to deal with what we call copyright today. It created the notion that the creator of a work was the owner of copyright, and that there was a fixed term of protection for the author. It also required that the author distribute nine copies to different libraries.3
Up until 1882, when the Berne Convention was codified, an author in France would have copyright in France, yet the English would be free to copy
it without a problem. The situation worked both ways - an author would only have copyright within their own country.
So, the Berne Convention on Literary and Artistic Works was introduced to overcome this. It has been revised a number of times, with one of the
most major amendments being to set the term of copyright at life + 50 years (1908). It has also been expanded to include new technologies.4
Most countries which are signatories to the Berne convention have similar copyright laws, establishing the moral right of an author to be identified as the author, and granting an exclusive term of protection. Copyright law, however, is always changing to allow for new technologies, or problems identified with the current system of copyright.